Transcript: Trump And Putin's Joint Press Conference
PUTIN: Thank you so much. Shall we start working, I guess? Distinguished Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. Negotiations with the President of the United States Donald Trump took place in a frank and businesslike atmosphere. I think we can call it a success and a very fruitful round of negotiations.
We carefully analyzed the current status – the present and the future of the Russia/United States' relationship – key issues of the global agenda.
It's quite clear to everyone that the bilateral relationship are going through a complicated stage and yet those impediments - the current tension, the tense atmosphere - essentially have no solid reason behind it. The Cold War is a thing of past. The era of acute ideological confrontation of the two countries is a thing of remote past, is a vestige of the past.
The situation in the world changed dramatically.
Today both Russia and the United States face a whole new set of challenges. Those include a dangerous maladjustment of mechanisms for maintaining international security and stability, regional crises, the creeping threats of terrorism and transnational crime, the snowballing problems in the economy, environmental risks and other sets of challenges.
We can only cope with these challenges if we join the ranks and work together, hopefully we will reach this understanding with our American partners.
Today's negotiations reflected our joint wish, our joint wish with President Trump to redress this negative situation in the bilateral relationship, outline the first steps for improving this relationship to restore the acceptable level of trust and going back to the previous level of interaction on all mutual interests issues.
As major nuclear powers, we bear special responsibility for maintaining international security.
(inaudible) vital and we mentioned this during the negotiations. It's crucial that we fine-tune the dialogue on strategic stability and global security and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
We submitted our American colleagues a note with a number of specific suggestions.
We believe it necessary to work together further to interact on the disarmament agenda, military and technical cooperation. This includes the extension of the strategic offensive arms limitation treaty.
It's a dangerous situation with the global American anti-missile defense system. It's the implementation issues with the INF treaty. And, of course, the agenda of non-placement of weapons in space.
We favor the continued cooperation in counter-terrorism and maintaining cyber security. And I'd like to point out specifically that our special services are cooperating quite successfully together.
The most recent example is their operational cooperation within the recently concluded World Football Cup.
In general, the contacts among the special services should be put to a system-wide basis should be brought to a systemic framework. I reminded President Trump about the suggestion to re-establish the working group on anti-terrorism.
We also mentioned a plethora of regional crises. It's not always that our postures dovetail exactly, and yet the overlapping and mutual interests abound.
We have to look for points of contact and interact closer in a variety of international fora. Clearly, we mentioned the regional crisis, for instance Syria. As far as Syria is concerned, the task of establishing peace and reconciliation in this country could be the first showcase example of this successful joint work.
Russia and the United States apparently can act proactively and take leadership on this issue and organize the interaction to overcome humanitarian crisis and help Syrian refugees to go back to their homes. In order to accomplish this level of successful cooperation in Syria, we have all the required components.
Let me remind you that both Russian and American military acquired useful experience of coordination of their actions, established
